Latest News

We hold events for our alumni, friends, and the general public for people to connect with the important conversations in leadership.

Subject matter experts and prominent New Zealand leaders share their knowledge and engage with the audience, sparking new ideas and innovation as minds from different backgrounds converge and focus their energy on a salient issue or theme.

My boarding call is in five minutes, but we are snatching one last conversation from the weekend. We look at each other. Trying to make sense of the last three days.

Did you… I feel so… Do you think…

I had been warned. Sparkly-eyed, you’ll-see, gleefully warned by those who had been here before me. Leadership New Zealand? Oh! Ha! Hold on tight!

I have. Tight tight tight. Tight through the imposter-syndrome phase. Tight through the oh-holy-shit-what-have-I-done phase. Phases. Tight through the sessions well over my head. Tight through the painful insights, and the joy, and the requests to expand. Again.

Tight through the realisation (first retreat, first day, three hours in) that I am going to cry a LOT in front of these people.

Tight.

White-knuckled and curious. Testing my grip strength. Holding on through the ground-shifting intensity of it all.

Half way, now.

Christchurch. Hanmer.

I was welcomed by the stones of Ngā Whāriki Manaaki. I walked, heavily, to ruined cathedrals. Lightly, to spiral-slided playgrounds. I advocated for a dying lake to an extraterrestrial judge. And snort-laughed at crepe-paper theatrics.

I sucked in perfect Hanmer air, and Instagrammed perfect Hanmer landscapes. I watched a man unearth a latent gift for poetry.

I sat, bark pressing through my coat. Pines. Wet grass. Back-lit seed heads. Bight red berries on bare grey stalks. A creek singing over stones. I was greeted by a small black Lab with a flailing tail. He pushed his nose into my calf. Hello.

I talked to trees.

I breathed in for four. Held for seven. Out for eight.

I saw yet another way I have been blinkered. Ow. I cried. I ate peanut-butter bliss balls and went to bed early.